Movies: Past, present and future

Oscars: 'Inside Job' wins documentary

February 27, 2011 | 7:38pm

Wow! Someone said something worth remembering. Charles Ferguson, director of the winning "Inside Job," who began his acceptance speech by noting that three years after the worst financial meltdown in our history, the subject of "Inside Job," "not a single financial executive has gone to jail."

The subject was a tough one. Most of us are so exhausted by the financial crisis, meltdown, implosion, that the idea of sitting through a serious look at the whys and the hows was not exactly appealing. And yet it was. Ferguson and the writers did a masterful job of creating tension and handing us the facts to back up all that anger. It was OK, it turns out, to be as "mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it anymore' " (Peter Finch, "Network," 1976).